Being in the flyway was truthfully neither among the criteria nor motivation for us when we decided to buy this farm situated just up the hill a-ways from Big Stone Lake. As we began carrying the buckets and boxes of discarded lath-work and crumbled plaster to the huge dumpsters we were often stopped by the skeins of geese, by both the sound and the beauty of flight as they moved from fields to frozen wetlands.

Then, on the drive back and forth from Rebecca’s house in Clinton, we watched as continuing populations of different ducks stopped on the way through. Redwing blackbirds soon took up negotiations in the cattails on the sloughs along the roadways, and in the grove, flocks of various songbirds came to rest and roost.

Migrating gulls rise from the ice at the National Wildlife Refuge.

Every day became an adventure. Rebecca saw her first merganser, and my excitement in seeing my first curlew was duly noted.

Now, a year later and with the inside work completed, we await a new migration. Over the winter I purchased a photographic blind as part of that anticipation. Already the vees of geese are flying overhead, and a couple of nights ago we watched as two huge flocks of snow geese flew overhead reflecting the golden hue of the sunset.

Someone mentioned that the redwings, which for me have traditionally been the true sign of spring, were seen just south of here. In two days of travel through the area, though, I’ve not seen a single one although there are cattails along many of the roadways and highways.

For ten years we lived in the heart of the Mississippi flyway along the Little Vermilion River just east of Hastings. The Little Vermilion cut through town, then through the near wilderness backwaters parallel with the Mississippi from Hastings to Redwing, a distance of nearly 30 river miles. This land was swampy and wild, filled with trees and backwater lakes. After more than a decade of living in Colorado, moving into the flyway was thrilling every spring and fall as new species of birds continued to find the feeders just outside our dining room table. Hours were spent watching this bird life just inches away from our plates, and really, we catered to the birds with our landscaping and plantings … as did many of our neighbors.

Small skein of geese in the morning sun.

Here in the Minnesota River flyway, which by most accounts is still part of the Mississippi, we see a much different grouping of birds. We certainly see more ducks, geese, gulls, terns and wading birds, along with the “usual suspects” among the warblers and songbirds, here than on the eastern side of the state. Last spring, by chance, one of us looked into the high canopy of the grove and suddenly realized what we were seeing wasn’t leaves but rather hundreds of birds resting from their flight.

Being outside this time of year is special, and especially for the sounds. Each sighting reminds one of that sense of comfort in greeting an old friend. “Welcome back to the neighborhood,” you want to shout. “You missed one hell of a winter.” Ah, yes, seeing them, one and all, is knowing spring is coming. In his Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold wrote, “A March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward, ear cocked for geese.” I’d suggest the same holds for a March afternoon.

While it’s true the flyway was neither criteria nor motivation, finding an area where the very last less than one percent of the prairie pothole biome has yet to be shadowed by the plow or drained by plastic drainage pipe was certainly in our thoughts when we bought our farm. Just over the ridge to the east, and up the hill and across the road, are two beautiful wetlands, and although this area is definitely part of the sea of summer corn that has replaced big bluestem in the prairie pothole ecology, our county has in my estimation probably the highest number of the original potholes (wetlands, sloughs or whatever noun you choose to use) in Western Minnesota.

It’s these wetlands, my choice of noun, that attracts the geese, ducks, mergansers, gulls, terns, eagles and waders, and the old farm groves, remaining oak savannas and tree-lined edges of Big Stone Lake and a few of the gullies that haven’t been dozed into field configurations, and provides refuge for the song birds. Eliminating these last remaining few pieces of the ecology would likely divert the birds elsewhere.

Redwing blackbird establishing his territory.

For now the flyway is alive, although we’re well past the days spoken of by old timers my age who remember when the prairie skies were blackened by waves of migrating redwing blackbirds. These are stories that typically begin with, “When I was a kid …” Yet we can look skyward and see the skeins of geese, sometimes several at once, some with hundreds of birds, all making announcements of an awakening spring. It is up to us to keep our ears cocked and eyes skyward as March marches on toward April.

Earlier this week while Rebecca was gone for a meeting I sat with a cat in my lap on the couch in the solarium and watched a mass of birds launch from a treeline across the field from our farm, a mass that turned suddenly to fly directly over the house. Not a sun blotter, but an impressive number. Meanwhile, skeins of geese continued to pass between the lowering sun and my perch on the couch, enough so that I finally sat the cat aside and went for my camera. And I sat for almost an hour waiting as the sun followed a slow path, and finally a quick sink, as no more skeins appeared … although I heard several pass on the east side of the house nearer the wetlands.

Spring migration, when the sky is alive with sound and feathered fury, is my favorite time of year.

Both of us have children. With luck, perhaps, they will live long past my lifetime, and even Rebecca’s. With luck, perhaps their’s will be a comfortable life, economically and environmentally.

Luck, perhaps, is nebulous, for it wasn’t even a week ago she rose from her office chair and went off into one of her classic rants about the state of earth. Though I don’t recall the exact topic, it could have been our continued and shared views on the disrespect being shown to soil in farm fields by neighboring farmers, or of the frac sand mining issues. We discuss many politically sensitive subjects, and many have to do with the environment and both the corporate and non-corporate attacks on our dear Mother Earth.

“The truth of the matter,” she exclaimed, using her familiar hatchet chop gestures, “is that the ship has sailed and it won’t be coming back!”

Translated this would suggest that should our own Congress ever do something, let alone countries like China and India where emission standards are so low that thousands of residents of those nations resort to wearing facial masks, life as we have known it on earth is likely past the point of being saved. True to character, I threw out some lame bit of positive argument that went nowhere.

Our conversation came to mind while listening to a presentation by Mark Seeley, a University of Minnesota climatologist and MPR climate darling, at a Land Stewardship Project gathering in Starbuck. He was nearing the end of a compelling presentation augmented with factual data on how our Minnesota climate has changed so dramatically in the past three decades. Yes, our winters are certainly warmer … even if our past winter was considered an aberration more so than the norm of just a few decades ago.

Climatologist Mark Seeley makes a point in his presentation at the Land Stewardship Project’s Starbuck, Minnesota, gathering.

And, yes, our summer dew points are also rising, along with the frequency and fierceness of severe weather events. Humidity is rising, along with coincidental health and pest issues. Droughts and flash flooding are as common nowadays as blackbirds in the bulrushes. In the same years of record high moisture events, we have consequential droughts recorded. An overnight, ten-inch rainfall in Duluth was followed by months of drought. Events are more localized, in that a farmer might have enough rain for a crop while a neighbor just to the south records a drought. Minnesota has recently set records for the number and frequency of tornadoes, and F5’s, once more common much further to the southwestern states, have been recorded both here and in Canada.

Consequently, with such variances in catastrophic weather events, property insurance rates are going ever higher and higher.

Near the end of his presentation, Seeley displayed a set of maps that showed modeled projections of a narrow climatic band that crossed the state through the Twin Cities, a band modelers at the University of Minnesota project will reach the Minnesota-Canadian border by the 2060s.

In other words, the weather and temperature common through the middle of the state would evolve to become more common at the far northern border. This would leave a broad breadth of our state with a climate not unlike mid-Missouri perhaps, although Seeley admitted he couldn’t answer the question in good faith without first talking to the modelers to know what they had projected for that deep band of uncertainty colored brown on his maps. “I need to find an answer to that,” he said. “Next question.”

“Has our ship sailed?” I asked, without referencing our office conversation of about a week earlier. “Can we turn this around and come back to the port of what we know as a normal climate?”

“Not unless we start having conversations, as politicians, as nations, even as neighbors,” Seeley started, and he became increasingly animated as he portrayed the political polarization surrounding climate change along with an apparent dismissing of statistical data proving otherwise. Then he dropped the bomb. “From what we see, and from how climate has changed, and how it is being modeled based on scientific data, even if we put the necessary changes in place today, it is unlikely we could expect to right the changes in earth’s climate even before our grand-children’s, or even their children’s, generations.”

Among the 100 or so in attendance in the cavernous hall, a dropped pin might have crashed like thunder.

With Seeley’s “Minnesota Weather Almanac” in front, he keeps a large audience spellbound with his data presentation.

In the morning news, little had changed. Up north the EPA had okay-ed a permit for Polymet to continue forth on its efforts for huge, open pit copper mining despite the threats to both ground and surface waters, including the adjacent Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Country ditches, already clogged with snirt from melting snow, are now filling with muddy runoff from farm fields. No changes were forthcoming in frac sand mining, West Virginia’s drinking water supplies, North Dakota’s groundwater issues nor a proposed a mid-continent pipeline for moving oil sands. And, yes, more photographs of Chinese residents wearing protective face masks due to emission pollution. In other words, a status quo on climatic issues and threats worldwide.

Years ago in my previous marriage I expressed concern on learning that we were expecting our first child together, for as a nation we were entering extremely uncertain financial times. Those have evolved to a point where the children born in that generation  are basically unemployable as a result of the economy. Those same children, now young adults, are facing a future that doesn’t bode well in terms of an even greater threat … the health of the very earth we all share. For them, their children, and especially their grandchildren.

Even as a confirmed optimist, I don’t envy their future.

Back at an age when mother-pleasing was something boys seven or eight find easy was perhaps when the concept of wind first entered my consciousness. We were in the midst of one of those sultry 90-90 Missouri summer afternoons without air conditioning with no hint of a comforting breeze.

“Don’t worry,” I told my mother. “I’ll make the wind start.”

We had a young elm, or so it seemed. I scampered up the tight bark, grabbed a long and low hanging limb to pull myself further into the heart of the canopy. Using my arms and legs I started pushing limbs and jumping on the branches with all my might. If I could just get some air moving, I thought, the wind would begin. A passerby might have slowed at the vigorous movement in the center of the tree … until one of the branches holding me aloft snapped and I was sent sliding down into the yard.

“Nice try,” said my mother with a smile once she realized there was no broken bones. “But you can’t start the wind.”

Wind-blown snow creates a halo effect on a prairie wetland.

This was the beginning of my being haunted by the wind. From the slight, calming breezes that sooth the soul to the extreme of feeling and hearing of the forces of a 300 mph plus trauma of wind that swirled around the circumference of a thunderous storm cell to propel a six-seater cloud seeding plane above the Northeastern Colorado plains. Now, living here in the open prairie, wind is nearly a constant companion. It rumbles, sometimes like low thunder, from all directions, often deep into the night. It may tingle our wind chimes, or produce a wild, Beethoven-ish symphony clanging from the ash and oaks in the yard. Sometimes when you try to take a step into it out on North Meadowbrook, a northwesterly will stand you straight to halt you in mid-step. Wind has moved hundreds of tons of topsoil this winter, yet has delicately written “poems” in soft snow using prairie grasses as cursive “pens.”

Tips of prairie grass leave wind-etched “poems” in the winter snow.

This haunting caused a friend to recently tease me of how I could happily forgo watching commercial television programming for cultural media awareness in order to follow my passion for making images of prairie grasses in the wind.

“You must realize that watching prairie grasses blowing in the wind isn’t for everyone,” she chided.

Indian Grasses dance in a prairie wind.

Wind is my weakness. There was that late fall evening in the 1970s in an old farmhouse outside of the Newton, IA, home of the teenage boy who’s letter prompted Pope John Paul II to visit Iowa, when I asked the family while I was doing his story if I could spend a few moments alone in an upstairs bedroom just to hear the whistling of the wind. They smiled as I backed into the room and turned off the light to sit on the bed. It had been years since I’d heard that whistle and whine of the wind in the sleeping porch of my parent’s old Missouri farmhouse. It whispered a momentary meditation.

So, yes, I have many wind stories. Last weekend as I sat alone in my canvas ice fishing “clam,” a ferocious wind whipped and snapped the canvas during a Severe Winter Warning with a -45 degree wind chill, bringing  many wind moments to life as I fought off the bone chilling cold. Wind games, if you will, playing with the mind and the numbing elements.

Sportsmen around here have given ample warnings about these Big Stone Lake winds that howl down this 26 mile long corridor of water, and now, ice. “Never get far from shore in your kayak,” they’ve warned in the warmer months. “You never know when the wind will come up, and remember, there isn’t anything out there to slow it down.”

Many tell tales of friends being caught, or of themselves being in instant peril, being stranded miles from a boat launch or pushed against a distant shore, of being capsized and adrift. This time on the ice was as close as I have come to feeling the heed of their warnings.

Despite the side flaps of the canvas panels being buried beneath ample ice chips and snow, the canvas snapped and popped with incredible and forceful energy. I was afraid of standing, fearful of the clam blowing away down the length of the lake. As I watched the undulating sides of canvas I was visited with another wind game, from of all places, the Caribbean somewhere outside of Road Town, BVI. I suddenly visualized being on the deck of the 210 ft. barquentine I was fortunate enough to help sail in the late 1970s. As we maneuvered the big square-rigged sailer into open seas, the huge sails filled with wind, snapping and popping the sailcloth just like it was my ice fishing canvas on Big Stone. Indeed, these were the only sounds as the antique naval training ship listed slightly and cut a magnificent wake in the azure sea.

I could only wish the mental images of the blue Caribbean skies had been more warming, as had the few jumbo perch pulled up through the ice. This would be another day dominated by prairie winds sweeping in from the Saskatchewan Plains, winds that once again lifted loam and snow into the skies up on the prairie and rattled old windows.

Indian Grass and heads of cone flowers moved by prairie winds.

Through the night gusts rumbled through like a distant freight train, warded off by solidly insulated walls and a bevy of quilts made by the mother of her modern day Don Quixote, a man who has come to realize he can neither start nor end a wind … even he might wish to.

Neither of us have seen the owls, although there might have been a distant sighting of one earlier in the winter. After the winds had ripped the last of the leaves from the trees in the grove we witnessed what seemed to be a silhouette reminiscent of a stately owl on a limb of the huge cottonwood that stands as a sentinel on the far northeast corner of our stand of trees. My binoculars made the darkened dot a little larger, enough so that it might resemble what you envision as a great horned owl. That is as close as we have come to seeing one.

The cottonwood is high enough to give an owl a vantage point view of both our eight acres of prairie and a wetland just over the rise of the hill on the other side of the road.   

We know owls are around us for we can hear them hooting. First one, then another. One closer, the other more distant. Just a quarter mile to the west of our farm is another good sized woodland … good sized in Minnesota prairie terms. Perhaps five acres in all, right along the gravel road. The distant hoot could come from there if the closer one is in our grove. 

Rather convincing evidence that owls are near greeted me on my return from the mailbox the other evening. Laying beneath the canopy of our recently cleaned grove was the carcass of a red bellied woodpecker with the upper skull eaten away. Perhaps this was the one I’ve been stalking with my camera. A red bellied was one of the first species to find our feeder once we got around to filling it with the ever popular black sunflower seeds.  

In my quest to capture an image of this beautiful bird I’ve set up my blind to no avail, and my luck using a remote shutter release wasn’t much better. This was one camera shy bird, unlike some of the other species coming to the feeder. The smallest woodpecker, the downy, and the larger hairy woodpeckers, have joined the bluejays and nuthatches in my digital cache of photographs, but not the red bellied.

Finding the carcass seemed to answer why the sightings of the red bellied had suddenly become so scarce. We’ve missed that telltale swoop down to the small tree the holds the squirrel-proof feeder, for the red caught your eye especially on those gray or whitish mornings. It would land low on the base of the tree and skitter up the trunk to where it was just a short hop over to the feeder. Once a seed was secured, off it would fly over the solarium porch back to the grove.

Seeing the red bellied in the grove earlier in the fall keyed our decision to keep a number of what we called our “woodpecker trees” among the ash and other trees too immature for the saw. As we worked around one tree in particular, one with obvious pecked holes in the long dead wood of the trunk, the woodpecker had briefly peeked out at us. We assumed this was where the red bellied was returning with its seed. When the hairys return to the grove with their seeds they alight on our “lightning” tree, crawling up ever higher before breaking open the seed. Not the red bellied, for it typically flew deeper into the grove to its tree. That flash of red wasn’t good for keeping secrets. Not from us, nor apparently from the owl.

When I found the carcass, most of the head and that telltale identifying red stripe on the crown was gone. Eaten away in a meal of nature. 

It was on a canoeing trip years ago on the Chippewa River that made me instantly think the culprit in the demise of the red bellied was an owl. We had just paddled around a bend when we came upon a noisy confrontation. Perched on a staunch limb just below the protective outreach of the canopy was a great horned owl, and scurrying all around it was a murder of crows, diving and cawing, threatening the much larger and dangerous bird of prey with pronounced racket and mayhem.   

“Accusations,” suggested my paddling and fishing friend, Wes Konzin as we slowed the canoe. “I think it all comes down to beheadings.”

Sometimes you can sneak into the inner workings of the natural world in a canoe, or it may materialize beside you while quietly waiting in a deer tree stand. We were completely unheeded as we drifted by, intently watching the confrontation. Surprisingly, the owl suddenly bolted from the tree, hastily beating its wings to escape just over us in that supremely hush of owl flight with the murder close behind, cawing, some deftly diving at its head, to land again inside of an outstretched canopy of a tree just down river. There the murder of crows continued their relentless attack.   

The birds know. So the beheading of the red bellied was a circumstantial CSI moment in the grove perhaps.   

After finding the carcass, calls were made to a couple of naturalists who both confirmed that the red bellied woodpecker had likely met its fate at the beak of an owl, that the eating of the head was indeed a significant clue.

Death is often sad, especially for those who remember a certain specialness. For the shy woodpecker, we’ll miss that flash of red swooping into our little square window to the outside world, its hopping up the narrow trunk of the tree, at how nervously it looked around in a search of danger, the quick stab for a single sunflower seed, then just as quickly, the flash of red disappearing back toward a hideaway in the grove. One of those flights was its last.

All in the realm of nature.

Making dinner around here is so much fun. We rarely layer noodles with soups from Campbell’s’, and usually have a glass of wine within reach. One of us will usually stake ourself across the room chatting with whoever has opted to cook. Often we’ll walk around the center island to glance out the big kitchen window to take in what is typically a postcard worthy view. This happened again last night with a startling sunset.

Sunset from the kitchen window.

“Startled” might be considered a bit extreme, and “surprise” might be closer to an appropriate reaction to when we first entered this kitchen where we spend so much of our quality time. This was my reaction on first looking at two double-hung windows with blurring screens found above the kitchen sink. “If we buy the house,” I said as we began our first look around, “these windows have to go. We must have a big plate glass window in here.”

Rebecca and Steve Bruns talking in the kitchen during the remodeling phase. The double hung windows are behind Steve.

Rebecca was no stranger to the house and especially in this kitchen where she recalled having numerous meals with her friends, the previous owners. If she was taken back by my comment, she hid it well.

Roger Albright and Steve Bruns bringing the new kitchen window up to install.

The kitchen window after installation.

Windows have long been a fascination. Whether visiting an old farm house like ours, a hospital or motel room, or even a European castle, I always find myself looking through the windows to see what there is to see. You know, “If I were king I’d put a window right here” sort of thing. I’ve never understood blocking a window view with a lamp, or even curtains. This has caused a few arguments and awkward moments through the years, and usually I’ll back down on the curtains.

Moon set from kitchen window.

Windows can showcase a larger world much like a picture frame. Through the years I’ve seen some fascinating views through the windows of others. So, in our pending purchase I simply couldn’t consider having all that wood framing and grayish screens blocking such an incredible view of the wooded grove, the nearby prairie or that distant farm site, views that seemingly are varied with each sunrise and setting sun, by cloud patterns, by rain, fog and blizzardy snow. These views never tire.

Sun dog from our kitchen window.

This kitchen window was one of two major window decisions we would make in remodeling the house. The other was in the upstairs bathroom where there was no window at all in the East wall. We had decided rather early to completely redo that room. Along that wall was a wide vanity. A toilet was placed up against the adjoining inside wall and was in plain view of the door opening to the hallway. There was no shower nor bath. We would eventually do a complete reworking of the room by removing enough of the floor to move the toilet across the room behind the door, to install a smaller vanity and sink where the toilet originally sat, and by adding a spa bath where the old vanity had been. It while I was framing in the tub surround that I thought of adding a window, to bring in more light, and to add a view.

Removing the cut out for the bathroom window.

Tile would be added across the entire floor and as a shower surround. And in that bare wall we cut a hole to add a modest plate glass window we had hoped would give us a nice view of the prairie and nearby wetland while sitting in the bath. That, we’ve since discovered, won’t happen since neither of us have the height of a NBA basketball player. Our view from the toilet, however, has no equal!

Fortunately this house has many windows and wonderful views from all angles. Our front porch solarium has a surround of windows on three sides, and the large windows from our office and family room offer views from the inside out into the solarium.

My muse for the kitchen began while doing a story on the husband of a former colleague who had a stately old house on the outskirts of Maynard. When they remodeled their kitchen they replaced double hung windows with a large open window above the sink that looked out onto their grove and picturesque pond garden. Their new window transformed a rather tired and forgettable kitchen into an exciting and comfortable room, inviting you into the world beyond. The window added life to a nearly barren room, a place where you could easily imagine planting your elbows on the kitchen counter to stare at an enticing outdoor landscape. It wasn’t hard to imagine having the same effect in our new home.

Sun rise through the bathroom window.

As we progressed in our remodeling I found myself anxiously awaiting the removal of the double-hungs. When it finally happened I could barely contain my excitement. It was the same when we finally lifted a ladder to cut through the outside wall for the new bathroom window. I don’t know if my co-workers on the remodeling project were all initially sold on cutting through the wall for that window, but afterwards they were equally as pleased and excited. Especially when we had finished with the tiling that framed the window from the inside.

Those two windows are my favorite places in our new home, framing views worthy of the Louvre every morning and evening. We couldn’t have made better decisions, nor could we be more blessed.

(Luise Hille and I pose with my River Truck after kayaking on the Minnesota River. 

I can’t remember the color of my “original” River Truck. It still had some miles left in it when the heater died in the dead of winter. A repair of the heater edged the beater into what insurance adjusters call “totaled.” So I drove onto a used car lot just to see what was around.

You’ll occasionally see a car slowly meandering through a dealership as the driver rubber necks at those rows of discarded dreams. One of those was me. Nothing stood out, yet I parked and ventured inside to talk with the saleslady. This is a huge undertaking since I’ve long suffered a sense of trepidation after a car salesman at a St. Paul nightspot laughed and said people like him love it when people like me walk through the doors.

“We can spot guys like you a mile away,” he laughed, tipping his long-neck bottle against mine in a friendly gesture. “You’re easy. Guys like you we call ‘marks.’”

Unlike at the city lots, my saleslady friend has treated me with respect and fairness.

“You really, really loved that old Explorer, didn’t you?” she said, with honest concern.

Indeed. That kayak/canoe rack on the top looked and fit just right, and it was easy to lower half of the backseat down to lay out a pad and sleeping bag. A portable ice fishing shack fit easily in the back, too. Bluegill flies that drifted from the boxes weren’t blown away in that 60 mph draft. Gosh, I could go on and on about the pluses.

“Did you see that blue one out there?” she asked.

Somehow I’d passed it by.

“Just got it in. Owned by a woman banker down by Sacred Heart. She drove it to work on the bad snow days. Not a lot of miles on it. Want to take a look?”

“Does the heater work?” I asked.

It was only a year younger and had just under 50,000 on the odometer. I hadn’t realized we’d had that much snow. Mine was tickling 200,000. I’d driven all over western Minnesota, and made several trips down to the farm in Missouri. There were all those jaunts to the BWCA, too. She shot me a price. Fortunately what I’d already had transferred from savings for a decent down payment on a newer car or truck more than covered the price. For the first time ever I drove off the lot with a loan-free vehicle. Not just a vehicle, but a new River Truck! All the gauges and dashboard gizmo’s were exactly alike, and I now had a CD player. Plus, one of the mechanics had helped transfer the kayak racks and ice fishing gear.

That was a decade and some 100,000 miles ago. I still carry the kayaks up on the rack and my seasonal gear fits easily in the back. Missing is the radio antenna. The fellow at the car wash I ran it through at least annually showed me how to remove it with a crescent wrench so it wouldn’t catch in flappers, a trick that came in handy one day at an entry point near Ely. I took it off so it wouldn’t break taking the shotgun side kayak off the top, then laid it on the back bumper after it had rolled off the hood onto the ground. Must have happened a second time. That was about four years ago.

The cab doors used to be tighter, and the hatch door on the back won’t shut completely. By now I’ve replaced the shocks, tires and ball joints. The heater still works, and you can even take a snow drift at 50 without it breaking all apart like my delicate new little foreign car.

That’s the car I bought a couple years ago for better fuel economy. The fill ups actually arrive at about the same places. The kicker is that the River Truck holds just over 23 gallons of gas bone dry compared to not quite 11 for the little car. Same difference, but twice the cost for a fill up.

I was relying more and more on my little car until I tried plowing through a snow drift near the farm late last winter and tore off part of the plastic undercarriage near the bumper. My River Truck sputtered, as it does even in the heat of summer, but eventually started, and the little car was parked until the thaw.

This winter I’ve relied more heavily on my River Truck. I should have used it the other evening when I went to shoot pictures of the full moon rising over the prairie. The little car was warm and handy, plus I was just driving a mile or so down the road to an oak savanna. Unfortunately the trees were nowhere near the rising moon, so I quickly sped off down a lesser used road toward a nearby WMA. I saw the drift coming up, and frankly, it didn’t look all that solid. Darkness does that to a fellow, I guess. There wasn’t a whole lot of give to that icy, glazed-over drift. There was, however, a horrible crunching sound when I landed about 30 feet further down the gravel road. My seat belt no doubt saved a concussion. I’ll call the body shop after the melt.

After surveying the damage I realized the truth once again. Like I told Rebecca: “Should have taken the River Truck.”

Utility and a working heater help define a good River Truck. So does having dependable landing gear.

What though the radiance
which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass …

My windshield and passenger windows often offer dreamy drive-time visualizations of what a sea grass of prairie might have looked like. They say the big bluestem grew so high and thick that it wore through the toes of a horseman’s boots in a season of riding. Such landscapes, those vast seas of grasses, are no more.

Nor can you photographically capture a horizon of a wide prairie sky with a native prairie stretching toward focal infinity. More common is a foreground of 20 to 40 acre remnant with a mix of Indian grass, side oat gamma, big bluestem and seasonal forbs with a field of row-cropped acres draped across the horizon.

A friend dismisses the entirety by saying, “It is what it is.” Crops and cropland are necessary, yet so is a balance that is missing in this altered ecology that is slowly being eroded away.

I’m new at this prairie watching. Yes, it is big sky and horizon. Most days you can see the very top of a grain elevator in some rural railroad town a dozen miles in the distance. Maybe even a water tower at half that distance. A prairie also offers views that are close and personal. Yet it is a prairie without prairie, a land mass naked of its namesake.

When photographer Brian Peterson was working on his book, “Voices for the Land,” he admitted struggling to find a way to photographically define this vastness. One day he felt he had captured a sense of it not through an image of big sky and horizon, but rather in a photo of a small ant climbing the stalk of a cone flower. Yes, there is sky, along with four other cone flowers in the photograph, yet he focused on a small, intimate detail to define an undefinable landscape. Some claim it is practically impossible to accurately portray the vastness of the prairie, to portray that vastness in contrast to individual insignificance. Perhaps they’re right.

So we look at parts of the whole, at ants on cone flowers, or other symbols.

A prairie is not just defined by the grasses, but also the winds that ruffle and bend them. Ah, the wind. Curators of the area county museums can usually put their fingers on letters from the wives of sod busters describing how the wind became so unbearable, of how someone, perhaps the letter writers themselves, “had lost their mind” from the constant wail of the wind when there was so little to stop it. Especially in the dead of winter, a mind lost while huddled for warmth in sod huts and remote farm houses.

Yes, there is that rumble and roar of blizzards, but there is also a hush when grasses rise through the snow as in defiance of that rumble and roar. My wish has been to get a feel for the prairie when winter it isn’t quiet, when raging winds whip grasses with a vengeance. Then again, to return to portray the hush.

Although we have lived on this dispatched ecosystem for 22 years, this is my first to really concentrate on the prairie in winter. Twice I’ve driven off the farm yard during wind-whipped white outs to two different restored prairie remnants, including a Wildlife Management Area (WMA), to take pictures. In the scheme of seasons, winter is supposedly a quiet time, a rest perhaps, for the prairie. In winter, green isn’t evolving through dead and dormant grasses, nor is there a punctuation of color from blooming forbs in a blanket of green, nor are the acres of golden grasses painted by the fall sun being whipped and bent by autumn winds. So in that sense, winter is the season of rest despite the turmoil of arctic winds.

On one of those forays, with the sun muted by driven snow, the grasses of the Clinton prairie yielded to the winds, yet captured enough snow to create sea-like drifts. Enough snow was being captured that you could see a depth of perhaps a hundred yards … which was impossible on adjacent tilled fields. It was a wild moment in the “rest” — a wail that could cause one to lose their mind with a long exposure, for this blow continued for two to three continuous days. Cold and continuous.

A week or so later, on a late afternoon, the hush of both the prairie and wind had returned. There on a clear and windless day, in the captured depths of snow, in both stem and shadow, were wind poems that spoke of silent secrets.

Perhaps if we listen closely these poems may speak an endless and epic story, one our cultures of settlers, sod busters and industrial farmers have failed to silence. If you look close enough to find wind poems, and take time to listen close enough to hear those silent secrets. Take a moment, however long, and be quiet, however silent, and  simply listen.